I just put what threatens to be one of a long series of bad cakes in the oven and here I sit keying in as if I don't have to deliver said cake to "Teacher Appreciation Day" at my son's school in exactly one hour. Now I know people say there are no bad cakes, only bad bakers, but I'm here to tell you that the two can and do coexist in the selfsame space-just as can two dogs, a big dog and a small dog, if one of them is nuetered or spayed.

Before we continue toward that kennel of fish, I would like to stop here and unmix my metaphors a bit - ah, that feels bettah. So, I had already called in to Chris Powers' Mud Acres Bluegrass Show on WORT that morning to ask for some Norwegian bluegrass, but really to try to horn in on his act by telling him my new Norwegian Independence Day joke: "Some of da fellers will be runnin' in de Settendemai , but I thought I might celebrate by "setten onda mai butt." One should always read clear to the end of anything one is going to read before one begins, I think. For instance, a cake recipe should never be read from the top down, but rather from the bottom up. In the case of my bad cake, for example, which I hope is on the rise, I didn't follow my own good advice and I was three-quarters through when I counted up the number of bowls required to mix the separate elements and found the number no less than six.

This presented a panic, for I have not done dishes since last Settendemai, resulting in the fact that I had only two containers-the mixer bowl, already full of eggy mixture, and an empty five-pound coffee can. So I transferred the eggy stuff to the coffee can just ahead of realizing, as it slid all in, that there were some ground-coffee bits still in the bottom which look for all the world just like mouse doots. Now, I love my son and can only imagine what his teachers might say about a mom who brings a cake containing what looks for all the world like mouse dooty in it. That's when I determined I had to add poppy seeds to the batter. Then my mixer bowl had a power surge and flang egg-whites-"beaten to within an inch of their lives" all over my outfit, which I had already nearly ruined by trying to take out a nasty chocolate stain at the neckline with pure bleach (it's a pink blouse) and succeeded in making a giant blue stain, which I had cleverly covered with a pin.

So here I sit waiting for the inevitable bad cake to come out of the oven just in time for me to slide into said son's school and present the Mouse Doot and Poppyseed Bad Cake, which I hope is on the rise. Now, what I want to know is, how many of you actually went right here to the end of this and read it backwards when I told you to? Aha!

-Norma Gay Prewett (previously known as Gay Davidson-Zielske)


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